Gavin and Stacey wins top honours at Baftas

The veteran actress Dame Eileen Atkins has won her first Bafta for the BBC
costume drama Cranford, but it was the gentle comedy Gavin and Stacey which
stole the show.

10:14AM BST 21 Apr 2008

The BBC3 show received the Audience Award for Programme of the Year, the only prize of the night to be chosen by viewers, while James Corden, the show's co-creator and one of its stars, won Best Comedy Performance.

Corden, 29, started out as a child actor and spent eight years attending castings without landing a single job, before getting his big break in the ITV1 series Fat Friends and Alan Bennett play The History Boys.

Now he has two Baftas to his name and has sold the rights to Gavin and Stacey to the American television network NBC.

Success in the US could earn him and the show's co-creator Ruth Jones an estimated £2 million windfall.

The show - the first Bafta for the digital channel BBC3 - centres on the romance between Essex-boy Gavin (played by Mathew Horne) and Welsh Stacey (Joanna Page). Corden plays Gavin's best friend, Smithy, while Jones plays Nessa.

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Accepting his awards, Corden said: "This really is a great, great night for us. You will never, ever know what this means."

He dedicated his Best Comedy Performance prize to his family and to his writing partner, Jones, saying: "She's just the greatest writer and actress, she's the best friend anyone could hope for and as much Smithy as I am, and I share this with her."

The night had been predicted as a clean sweep for Cranford, the BBC1 period drama based on the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell.

But, in a surprise choice by the Bafta judges, it lost the Best Drama Serial award to Channel 4's Britz, a gritty two-part series about a young Muslim woman who becomes Britain's first suicide bomber.

Dame Eileen, 73, beat her co-star Dame Judi Dench to the best actress prize for her performance as Miss Deborah Jenkyns, the arbiter of correctness in the town of Cranford.

Although the Gosford Park star has picked up a string of theatre awards during her career, this was her first Bafta win and came 39 years after her first Bafta nomination, for the film The Dresser.

The recipient of this year's Special Award was film-maker Paul Watson, whose documentary Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell caused a storm for ITV1 when publicity material wrongly claimed it showed the death of Alzheimer's sufferer Malcolm Pointon.

In fact, Mr Pointon died three days later and the ensuing controversy proved a huge embarrassment for the broadcaster.

After picking up his award Watson criticised reality TV shows such as X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, saying they were part of the "bullying culture" inherent in the industry. "Television is in serious bad times," he said.

Bruce Forsyth, the veteran entertainer enjoying a new lease of life as host of Strictly Come Dancing, received the Bafta Fellowship.

The venue was a fitting one, as Forsyth began his career as host of Sunday Night at the London Palladium back in 1958.